I’ve largely avoided the political pageantry surrounding the alleged candidates for U.S. president in 2008. This is for several reasons. The first is that I am still a little burned out on the pure doses of politics that came in 2006, during my last round of physical science outreach to Washington and the November elections. I still listen to all my favorite news programs, and we’re getting a newspaper subscription to bring to our doorstep what radio and, increasingly less, TV can bring. But I’ve not been able to force myself to watch a full “presidential candidate debate”.
I guess this is for several reasons, in the end. The foremost is the political burnout. The second is that I once participated in a speech and debate class, and what they are putting on TV is not a debate. It’s more like a “reality TV” show, where a bunch of lucky contestants (some hand-picked by the media, some there for reasons unclear) get to duke it out in a hand-raising, talking point laden chatter fest. A moderator asking candidates to raise their hands in response to an issue is far from actual debate, and I believe that somewhere an English teacher dies whenever they call this form of entertainment a real political debate.
Hand-raising can still be interesting, I suppose. As I mentioned many weeks ago, when Republican candidates were asked whether they did not believe in the theory of evolution, three raised their hands. These were Senator Sam Brownback, former Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo. In some media reports following the event, some tried to clarify their position. It was clear from most of them that there was a deeper disconnect. These are candidates for President who cannot seem to separate a personal religious life from the study of the natural world. These can turn out to be largely incongruous pursuits, it seems, when it comes to certain political issues. Most issues involving a question – do we go to war? do we legalize a behavior? do we ban a behavior? – would be well-served by a strict fact gathering process, followed by withering peer review and a conclusion based on the evidence. That’s science, pure and simple. Personal belief systems, involving either an azure egg, a virgin birth, or a flying spaghetti monster, should have nothing to do with it.
On “Meet the Press”, Mr. Russert this morning interviewed Lance Armstrong. After his battle with cancer, Mr. Armstrong went on to win an unprecedented number of Tour de Frances and is now a leading spokesperson in the fight to fund cancer research and find cures for cancers. He spoke this morning about an upcoming forum with the ’08 candidates on cancer, in which he said he intends to ask very serious and direct questions about the candidates’ commitment to fighting the leading killer of Americans. Some candidates won’t be participating, apparently.
It occurred to me that this issue – fighting cancer – is an issue that is intimately tied to the ability of a candidate to appreciate the difference between personal belief and rigorous scientific investigation. In fact, in this particular case it is clear that a candidate who does not believe in the theory of evolution must either be an idiot or a liar if they now say that they support a rigorous publicly and privately funded fight against cancer. By its nature, cancer is a by-product of the mechanism of evolution – mutation – and at the same time an excellent example of how a biological system unequipped to check an invasive organism matched to its own biology will perish without the hand of evolution. In the case of our species, this is technological evolution that induces biological evolution. The theory of evolution gives us a framework to attack cancer, and without it we would be huddled in our shelters, praying for a miracle that might never come.
A politician doesn’t have to give up their personal beliefs to accept and appreciate the power and majesty of evolution as a means to understand and participate in the change of nature. A politician must only accept it as a means to do so, and those who cannot set aside their personal beliefs for an indispensable universal fact are, I believe, unable to lead. Such a person cannot be trusted to appoint the right people, people who understand and are willing to support the science, to solve the problems that can directly be tackled by its application. Lance Armstrong isn’t going to ask for a “Miracle Czar” or a “Prayer Czar” – he’s going to ask for a “Cancer Czar”. Who would Tancredo, or Brownback, or Huckabee, appoint to such a position? Would you trust a person who doesn’t believe in evolution to make the right decision, a decision that will affect the lives and deaths of tens of thousands of Americans?
